DAMIEN HIRST – The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011

Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, New York

I stumbled off walking the High Line in Downtown Chelsea, NYC and into the Gagosian on West 24^th Street on an unusually warm January day. The corporate, milky, frosted-glass frontage is ubiquitous in the area, acting almost as a psychological barrier to any riff-raff even thinking of breaching the threshold of the high-end commercial galleries proliferating the streets.

This sameness outside mirrors the spirit of the spots inside. I didn’t hold out much hope for the show, thinking that once you’ve seen one spot you’ve seen ‘em all. However, given I’d made the pilgrimage out here, having walked all the way from Broadway Soho, I felt obliged to enter the hallowed portals of Gagosian, if only to say I had done so.

I admit I was taken by surprise. Gagosian’s vast white spaces and polished concrete floors are the perfect backdrop to some of Hirst’s more monumental spot paintings, each comprising a single spot at the four corners of the canvas and some with one in the middle. Despite myself, I couldn’t help admiring the purity of colour that calls from across the room. There’s something about a spot that hooks the look: it’s a circle of pure hue, there’s no gradation, no visible brush strokes, there’s no distraction but eye candy for the colourist in us all.

At the back of my mind – for the attraction of these spots is their appeal to the primitive, that raw animal delight we take in unadulterated bright pigment – were the formulas that Hirst uses to conceive the works, plus the fact that once he’s had the idea, the works themselves are realised and crafted by others. (He’s the master art marketeer, after all, but I still feel this is a cop-out by someone who calls himself an artist). The spots look manufactured, but the smaller works reveal a human hand has been involved – just not the guy’s who’s taking the money. And even if all the spots were dollars, they’d come a long, long way short of reflecting their market value – just another thought on my mind.….

The mathematical formula behind the construction of each painting does not interest me; but the resultant after-images, particularly from the circular paintings, were something else I enjoyed and didn’t expect. The effect produced that human response to try to make an image of an apparently non-representative picture. The realisation quickly follows that there is no such sense to be made, which is a relief.

Back to the pure colours then. There’s no doubt that considered purely for their aesthetic qualities, the spots are enjoyable – a childlike response, perhaps. Personally, I was transported back forty-odd years to when I was first introduced to my bedroom wallpaper.  Chosen by my mother for its repeat-pattern of beautiful roses, I could only be obsessed by the tiny red dots making the centre of more generalised flowers along the periphery. She couldn’t hide her disappointment that these were what delighted me. Remembering this in front of Hirst’s great spots made for another unexpected and valued-added moment.